Neuroscience

Our neurocircuitry is profoundly shaped by a lifetime of learning.

Our sensory systems for hearing and touch overlap to stir a wealth of emotions.

To better understand our brains and design safer anesthesia, scientists are turning to EEG.

We brought Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth together to share their insights into neuroscience’s big question.

Consciousness is a continuous conversation between the feeling body and the knowing mind.

Will too much time in the virtual world impact how children develop in the real one?

We understand conscious experiences only in light of our nature as living creatures.

An aspiring cognitive scientist faces the sketchy truth about fMRI.

Forget these scientific myths to better understand your brain and yourself.

It might be more accurate to think of many of the brain’s 10 billion neurons as being deep networks, with five to eight layers in each one.

We’re mapping the brain in amazing detail—but our brain can’t understand the picture.

The beauty of this breakthrough is serendipity.

What the neuroscientist is discovering is both humbling and frightening him.

We understand conscious experiences only in light of our nature as living creatures.

For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our homes, and go to fewer places. Our stimuli these days, in other words, aren’t very stimulating. Too much day-to-day routine, too much […]

A neurologist makes an emotional visit to understand “resignation syndrome.”

How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren’t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make up what’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness, coined some years ago by the philosopher David Chalmers. There is no widely accepted solution to this. But, fortunately, […]

Fluid intelligence has several aspects, and aging affects them differently.

A temporal pattern of activity observed in human brains for the first time may explain how we can learn so quickly.

Hallucinatory drugs may allow our brains to let go of prior beliefs.

Ultrasound can be a neuromodulator—to increase or decrease the likelihood that neurons will fire. Exactly how this works remains unclear, but it likely results from the physical “shaking” of neurons.Illustration by Jackie Niam / Shutterstock A few years ago, at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, I escaped the noisy midday hustle and bustle, ducking into […]

Science and the humanities weren’t separate cultures to this critic.

An aspiring cognitive scientist faces the sketchy truth about fMRI.

“It’s really hard to define what’s special about neurons,” says Tufts molecular biologist Michael Levin. “Almost all cells do the things neurons do, just more slowly.”Illustration by jijomathaidesigners / Shutterstock Life seems to be tied to bioelectricity at every level. The late electrophysiologist and surgeon Robert Becker spent decades researching the role of the body’s […]

Forget these scientific myths to better understand your brain and yourself.

Carl Hart says drug addiction is often distorted by scientists and the media.

A new theory explains that dreaming opens our minds to unexplored possibilities.

How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin on how to age successfully.

Is memorizing a string of words a key to what makes the human brain unique?

Our sense of time may be the scaffolding for all of our experience and behavior, but it is an unsteady and subjective one, expanding and contracting like an accordion. Emotions, music, events in our surroundings and shifts in our attention all have the power to speed time up for us or slow it down. When […]

A neuroscientist searches for the roots of feeling innately connected to nature.

Some neuroscientists have long considered the brain’s oscillating electromagnetic fields to be interesting but merely “epiphenomenal” features of the brain—like a train whistle on a steam-powered locomotive.Illustration by Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock Christof Koch is a neuroscientist distinguished by his rock-solid scientific work and romantic yearning to understand consciousness. He recently closed an essay by […]

How your brain identifies an aroma from its minute molecular traces is a marvel.

Our brains are wired for new sensations.

Research finds that the subjective experience of time is linked to learning, thwarted expectations and neural fatigue.

How an accident led to what could be a medical revolution.

How does it emerge from bacon and eggs?

Anthropologist Helen Fisher tells us what the biology of love is.

Karl Friston takes us on a safari of his free-energy principle.

Inside a new theory of emotions that spotlights how the brain works.

Faced with a decision, the brain weighs its options by bundling them into rapidly alternating cycles of brain waves.

The glial cells of the nervous system have been eclipsed in importance by neurons for decades. But glia are turning out to be central to many neurological functions, including pain perception.

New evidence the neural rules of navigation are universal.

Virtual-reality experiments on fruit flies offer insight into how the brains of mammals, like us, might build maps of their world.Photograph by Tanya Wolff It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly’s brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very […]

We’re mapping the brain in amazing detail—but our brain can’t understand the picture.

We’re mapping the brain in amazing detail—but our brain can’t understand the picture.

An organized tide of brain waves, blood and spinal fluid pulsing through a sleeping brain may flush away neural toxins that cause Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

The rise and fall of the claustrum epitomizes the hunt for consciousness in the brain.

Neurological evidence for chaos in the nervous system is growing.

Singing experiments with residents of the Bolivian rainforest demonstrate how biology and experience shape the way we hear music.

A scientific field founded by men is now mostly female.

This nanoscale device meshes seamlessly with your neurons.

It’s time to accept the limits of how we think.

Beneath our awareness, the brain lets certain kinds of stimuli automatically capture our attention by lowering the priority of the rest.

Once we acquire language, we can live without it.

We share the basic experience of life with all mammals.

Where our minds go when words let us down.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux on what makes our brains unique.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. It’s very easy to break things in biology,” said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s really hard to make them work better.” Yet against the odds, researchers at the New York University School of Medicine reported earlier this summer that they had improved the […]

Researchers found that elongating certain brain signals in rats improved their memory. The work revealed a new property to look out for in the hunt for “biomarkers” of learning.

Without inner narratives we would be lost in a chaotic world.

Perhaps free will won’t forever be an issue philosophers mull over for a lifetime. Whatever the result, there’s always the ironic answer to the question of whether we have free will: “Of course we do. We have no choice.”Screengrab via The Good Place / YouTube In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral […]

The act of recalling something that happened to you looks very much like what happens when you imagine something new.Photograph by HBRH / Shutterstock Imagine a living room. Not yours or your friend’s or one you saw in a home makeover show, but one purely from your imagination—perhaps your ideal living room. You should have […]

New experimental results simultaneously advance and challenge the theory that the brain’s network of neurons balances on the knife-edge between two phases.

A neuroscientist confronts his anguish over experimenting on animals.

Two new studies show that the brain’s navigation system changes how it represents physical space to reflect personal experience.

The brain may represent concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”Sharon Mollerus / M.C. Escher / Flickr In 2014, the Swedish philosopher and cognitive scientist Peter Gärdenfors went to Krakow, Poland, for a conference on the mind. He was […]

Neurobiologists program a neural network for analyzing the brain’s wiring.

Neurons return to their original state after a change.

Developing brain networks act locally to build globally.

The surprising importance of spontaneous order and noise to how we think.

Olfactory glomeruli have a unique structure.

Human spatial memory is made up of numerous individual maps.

Scientists develop a new tool for precise genome editing in neurons.

Transplanted embryonic nerve cells can functionally integrate into damaged neural networks.

How the architecture of the brain shapes its functioning.

A surprising new result catches the attention of the neuroscience community.

A model of how human speech develops.

The relative timing of brainwaves encodes the structure of a sentence.

The learning process leads to a reorganization that extends to deep brain structures.

The sexier we perceive the music we are listening to, the more sensual we experience the contact—even if we know that we are touched by a robot instead of a person.

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine. If you watch an exhausted baby carefully, you may be able to see gravity tug heavy eyelids down. Likewise, a sleeping honeybee’s usually perky antennae droop. This adorable sign of insect repose may seem unremarkable. But studying insect slumber may ultimately help solve some of sleep’s greatest mysteries, Charlotte Helfrich-Förster […]

The brain is not relying on random-wiring, but self-organized neural networks for visual information processing.

Birds engage in all types of sleep in flight, but in remarkably small amounts.

Neuroscientists discover a mechanism for brain-wide communication when selecting a route toward a destination.

Researchers uncover molecular clues for synesthesia.

The head of the Max Planck Society discusses the science of creative visualization.

How fMRI has become an ethical obligation.

A scientific field founded by men is now mostly female.

Why time vanishes when you’re jamming.

The neurology of flow states.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. When he talks about where his fields of neuroscience and neuropsychology have taken a wrong turn, David Poeppel of New York University doesn’t mince words. “There’s an orgy of data but very little understanding,” he said to a packed room at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual […]

By paying more attention to behaviors, and not just the activity of neurons, two researchers critical of most neuroscience learned how brains make sense of spoken language.

How mirror neurons affect the experience of fandom.

The discovery that certain neurons have “music selectivity” stirs questions about the role of music in human life. Illustration by Len Small Before Josh McDermott was a neuroscientist, he was a club DJ in Boston and Minneapolis. He saw first-hand how music could unite people in sound, rhythm, and emotion. “One of the reasons it […]

One hundred trillion. It’s about the size of the global money supply (called “broad money”), the bacterial count of the human microbiome, and the number of transistors in a supercomputer. It’s also approximately the number of neuronal connections in the human brain. Connection has an exponential, multiplicative power to create complexity. It’s where the meat […]

How massive parallelism lifts the brain’s performance above that of AI.

How massive parallelism lifts the brain’s performance above that of AI.

Primitive reflexes shepherd us into this world, and out.

The statistics that grew out of Reverend Bayes’ apologetics became powerful enough to account for wide ranges of uncertainties. In brain science, it helps make sense of sensory input processes.Waiting For The Word / Flickr Presbyterian reverend Thomas Bayes had no reason to suspect he’d make any lasting contribution to humankind. Born in England at […]

Using a brain-computer interface, scientists are beginning to learn why learning is hard.

How new data is transforming our understanding of place cells.

How new data is transforming our understanding of place cells.

In 1978, 18-year-old Roy Watford confronted a fateful decision. No, it wasn’t which college to attend—it was whether to plead guilty, while believing himself innocent, to the charge of raping a 12-year-old girl. His grandfather didn’t want him to risk a jury sending him to prison for life, so he caved, plead guilty, and received […]

Why it’s impossible to always be happy.

Talking blobology with a neuroimaging researcher.

Stimulating part of the cortex as needed during learning tasks improves later recall. The finding reveals more about the brain’s memory network and points toward possible therapies.

The neuroscientist explains why feelings evolved.

Researchers recorded the activity of every neuron in a hydroid and correlated it with its behavior—a major conceptual and experimental breakthrough that might allow scientists to better understand how interactions among neurons control behavior.Photograph by Corvana / Wikicommons Rafael Yuste thinks neuroscientists have been looking at the brain too close. “It’s just like a TV […]

The emerging neurology of one of our most human characteristics.

To create a good living replica of the human brain, your best hope may be to let “organoid” components assemble it for you.

With three times as many neurons, why doesn’t the elephant brain outperform ours?

The Arais do not merely dissect illusions, but can generate them, taking an image that looks boringly normal and making subtle changes, to color and contrast, to fool our brains. If you don’t know how something works, break it. Science is built on creative destruction: Much of what neuroscientists know of the brain, they know […]

And how to make it think differently.

Last month, when the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, presided over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, he gave a speech that would go viral. In it, he rebuked the South’s long-nurtured tendency—expressed in slogans like, “Heritage, not hate”—to romanticize the Confederacy. “We shouldn’t romanticize Confederate monuments,” read a recent letter […]

A neurologist’s perspective on research into consciousness.

  In an early episode of Daredevil, Netflix’s series about Marvel Comic’s blind superhero, there’s a telling scene in which the crime-fighting protagonist tends to an injured friend. Although he lost his eyesight in a traffic accident as a boy, Daredevil can nevertheless perceive her wounds. From across his apartment, he senses that a cut […]

Most neuroscientists accept that the brain computes by modifying its synapses, the links between neurons. On this view, the brain learns because experience molds it, rather than because experience implants facts. But experience does implant facts. We all know this, because we retrieve and make use of them throughout the day.Illustration by Gary Waters / […]

Our subconscious love for fractals may tell an evolutionary story.

To try to understand what it might be like to be blind, think about how it “looks” behind your head.Photograph by charnsitr / Shutterstock In 2004 Peter König made a special belt: one that always vibrated on the side of it facing north. Put on the belt and face north, and it would vibrate in […]

The answer to a simple question may show if someone’s really “home.”

What the neuroscientist is discovering is both humbling and frightening him.

Inside a new theory of emotions that spotlights how the brain works.

Do animals share our capacity to feel conscious emotions?

After a visit from one of his patients in March, 1966, the psychiatrist Maurice Heatly noted, “This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility as he initiated the hour with the statement that something was happening to him and he didn’t seem to be himself.” That patient was Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old former […]

A look at paradoxes in language.

How to control the subjective experience of time.

Germany, 1865. A man, wealthy and powerful, gets into an argument with a colleague who calls him out for being the habitual liar that he is. Enraged, he challenges his accuser to a duel. The challenger has a military background and is no stranger to weapons and dueling. The challenged, a meek physician scientist, has […]

Germany, 1865. A man, wealthy and powerful, gets into an argument with a colleague who calls him out for being the habitual liar that he is. Enraged, he challenges his accuser to a duel. The challenger has a military background and is no stranger to weapons and dueling. The challenged, a meek physician scientist, has […]

The simple nerve cells of sea creatures helped scientists fathom human memory.

Are art and science of distinctly different cultures? The former often seems fixated on human experience, the latter on physical processes. In his most recent book, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, published this year, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel argues that such a separation no longer exists. The best-known […]

A new therapy holds hope for sufferers of Mal de Debarquement syndrome.

The neocortex is argued to be the seat of cognition, but crows don't have one.

What goes wrong in the brain chemistry of a gambling addict.

Why we get off on the game—and are better off for it.

Alex Honnold doesn’t experience fear like the rest of us.

We may complain about a defining feature of the city, but we also feed off it.

Do you know what information is? No worries if you don’t. Clarity on the concept is apparently hard to come by. In a May cover story, New Scientist wondered, “What is information?” The answer: “a mystery bound up with thermodynamics” that “seems to play a part in everything from how machines work to how living […]

Our sense of smell may have evolved to detect danger, not beauty.

Like some other futurists, Ray Kurzweil thinks the best way to avoid aging is to avoid biology altogether. With a sufficient understanding of the brain, he says, we’ll be able to upload our minds to (presumably non-organic) structures and become digitally immortal. This might sound plausible enough, if a bit speculative, since the pace of […]

What I learned trying to keep up with my 4-year-old daughter at the royal game.

Tantalizing evidence suggests that brain activity shifts to increase wisdom as we age.

With three times as many neurons, why doesn’t the elephant brain outperform ours?

Before Josh McDermott was a neuroscientist, he was a club DJ in Boston and Minneapolis. He saw first-hand how music could unite people in sound, rhythm, and emotion. “One of the reasons it was so fun to DJ is that, by playing different pieces of music, you can transform the vibe in a roomful of […]

The animals of neuroscience research are an eclectic bunch, and for good reason. Different model organisms—like zebra fish larvae, C. elegans worms, fruit flies, and mice—give researchers the opportunity to answer specific questions. The first two, for example, have transparent bodies, which let scientists easily peer into their brains; the last two have eminently tweakable […]

From ecstasy to withdrawal, the lover resembles an addict.

From ecstasy to withdrawal, the lover resembles an addict.

Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind.

Hill Street Studios/Getty Images When children grow up in poverty, their brains can take a different shape. That’s one of the stark and uncomfortable findings from the lab of Kimberly Noble, a pediatrician and cognitive neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University. Noble has used MRI scans to study the brains of children and found that […]

How online fear feeds political smear campaigns, stock market rumors, and ISIS propaganda.

Most neuroscientists believe that the brain learns by rewiring itself—by changing the strength of connections between brain cells, or neurons. But experimental results published last year, from a lab at Lund University in Sweden, hint that we need to change our approach. They suggest the brain learns in a way more analogous to that of […]

Imagine that a loved one, let’s say your brother, has suffered a serious brain injury. After languishing in a coma, he finally “emerges”—that is, he cycles between sleep and wakefulness, yanks his hand away when it’s pricked, is startled by loud noises, and so on. But it’s not clear that he’s ever truly awake; his […]

Santiago Ramón y Cajal recorded his dreams to prove Freud wrong.

An exclusive look at the dreams Santiago Ramon y Cajal recorded to prove Freud was wrong.

Glial cells are the brain’s architects, doctors, police, janitors, and gardeners.

The brilliant compromise between efficiency and ability in your head.

Have you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too. Have you ever seen a person crouching in a dark alley and mistaken it for a garbage bag? Me neither. Why […]

In an early episode of Daredevil, Netflix’s new series about Marvel Comic’s blind superhero, there’s a telling scene in which the crime-fighting protagonist tends to an injured friend. Although he lost his eyesight in a traffic accident as a boy, Daredevil can nevertheless perceive her wounds. From across his apartment, he senses that a cut […]

The National Institutes of Health’s “Human Connectome Project” aims to elucidate the architecture of nerve fibers in the brain, as illustrated here. Patric Hagmann, Department of Radiology, University Hospital Lausanne (CHUV), Switzerland In 2005 neuroscientist Henry Markram embarked on a mission to create a supercomputer simulation of the human brain, known as the Blue Brain […]

The systems theorist explains what’s wrong with standard models of intelligence.

    Last month in my Nautilus interview with love scientist Helen Fisher, we had a good time parrying over the value of viewing sex and romance in the pixels of a brain scan. Usually, she says, her friends and acquaintances, as well as journalists, want to talk about “the basics.” Just the other day, […]

Whole brain sections (top) and microscopic sections (bottom) illustrate the differences between the brains of a 65-year-old control subject (left) and John Grimsley (right), a long-time NFL player whose brain condition affected his behavior and who died in his 40s.BU CTE Center Steelers Pro Bowl center Mike Webster was never your typical meathead. During his […]

Talking sex, brains, and commitment with the best-selling scientist of love.

The high speed of society has jammed your internal clock.

By gently squeezing maladjusted foals, veterinary researcher John Madigan recreates the experience of traveling through the birth canal, lowering the levels of certain neurosteroids and “waking up” the young horses.Joe Proudman / UC Davis As a toxicologist at the University of California, Davis, Isaac Pessah focuses on how different molecules regulate human brain function and […]

Parkinson’s disease gave her the gift of creativity.

After a chunk of his brain was removed, guitarist Pat Martino got his groove back.

After a chunk of his brain was removed, guitarist Pat Martino got his groove back.

How silence affects the scientists who study it.

How silence affects the scientists who study it.

Zvonimir Orec via Shutterstock   Last July, Chris Perry went on an Alaskan cruise with her family to celebrate her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. When she boarded the massive Norwegian Sun cruise ship, she felt “a little woozy and weird” from the boat’s gentle rocking, she remembers, but the sensation quickly faded. Perry didn’t feel […]

The neuroscientist tackles consciousness and the self.

In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see.

  To adults learning a second language, it hardly seems fair: As they stumble their way through conjugation drills, fret over grammar textbooks, and fill in worksheets on constructing subordinate clauses, their children sop up the language while finger painting at preschool. Within months, correct syntax pours itself out of the tykes’ mouths, involving no […]

In his most recent book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Christof Koch wrote that he has known only one genius: Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule. “In a lifetime of teaching, working and debating with some of the smartest people on the planet, I’ve encountered brilliance and high achievement, but […]

The city is a big brain that can solve big problems.

r.classen via Shutterstock In the 1630s, Holland was gripped by the world’s only known case of “tulip mania.” The intensely colored flowers were already a luxury item before then, but their prices leaped when tulips with flame patterned petals hit the market, and they continued rocketing to previously incomprehensible levels. The price for a single […]

To try to understand what it might be like to be blind, think about how it “looks” behind your head.

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

The primatologist and neurologist talks turbulence—teens, stress, and the information age.

Neurological evidence for chaos in the nervous system is growing.

A “brainbow”: neurons labels with fluorescent tags, in this case, from a mouse.Stephen J. Smith via Wikipedia In his 2011 book, The Tell-Tale Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran says that some of the cells in your brain are of a special variety. He calls them the “neurons that built civilization,” but you might know them […]

The way we process faces means that symmetry is only part of the story.

Fluorescent-labeled neurons in a mouse hippocampus made visible using the new CLARITY technique.Kwanghun Chung & Karl Deisseroth, HHMI/Stanford Univ. It’s not our fault. Blame the theorists, explorers, experimenters, and inventors.  We at Nautilus try to keep on top of all the amazing new things happening in science, but there’s simply too much of it to […]

How your brain twists together emotion and place.

This image from a mouse brain shows the fluid channels (purple) and glia cells (green) flush out the brain’s waste into blood vessels.Jeffrey Iliff1 and Maiken Nedergaard For humans, sleep is an absolute requirement for survival, almost on par with food and water. When we don’t get it, we not only feel terrible, but our […]

Cross-section of a planarianJubal Harshaw via Shutterstock Earlier this year, scientists published a bizarre finding: A decapitated flatworm that grows a new head seems to retain memories from its old one. Weird—but not even close to the weirdest finding in the annals of flatworm memory research. Half a century ago, experiments by James McConnell the […]

What neuroscience is learning from code-breakers and thieves.

What neuroscience is learning from code-breakers and thieves.

Earlier today three US-based researchers shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on vesicles, special structures that ferry all kinds of molecules around biological cells, and are fundamental to those cells’ functioning. Their findings provide some key background for our understanding of life—information that will fill textbooks for decades—though they lack […]

Brain-computer interfaces are opening new possibilities.

Are your neurons thrown off by this photo? Shutterstock Most of us have an uneasy love/hate relationship with celebrity culture. No matter how much we try to pretend we’re above it all, celebrities somehow seep into our consciousness, whether it’s Miley Cyrus’s cringe-inducing twerking at the VMAs, or our enduring affection for the ensemble cast […]

What we can—and cannot—learn from brain science.

This past July the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby boy. An international press corps was parked in front of the entrance of the hospital for over four weeks before that. The UK’s Daily Mail interviewed a woman who’d flown in from New Zealand to camp out in front of Buckingham Palace awaiting the […]

It’s not fair to ask jurors to vote on a death penalty.

We humans take a lot for granted. Pizza delivery, email, smartphones, dishwashers. All of this occurs in the background, making our lives simpler. None of it requires any explicit effort. Our minds also do a lot of subconscious work that we take for granted. Have you ever seriously thought about how you know that the […]

In Jasper Fforde’s lighthearted “Thursday Next” series of books, people can use a “prose portal” to enter the world of a book, to change the plot or kidnap a character. The prose portal is an imaginative metaphor for a familiar experience: feeling taken away by a narrative, sucked into a good book so that we […]

Artists who manipulate photos capture the ambiguity—and beauty—of vision itself.

Artists who manipulate photos capture the ambiguity—and beauty—of vision itself.

Music that upsets expectations is what makes your gray matter sing.

What, exactly, makes our biology special?

We make sense of the world through stories—a deep need rooted in our brains.